John,
On Jul 25, 2007, at 1:14 PM, John Curran wrote:
All the existing big businesses can operate with what they already
have, Google and Yahoo are not going to face any sort of crisis
for the foreseeable future. And as I've been saying for a while
and Randy put in his presentation, supply and demand will simply
cause the cost of having public IPs to go up from zero to
something tiny - enough to see IPs being put back into the pool to
those who really need them.
Putting them back into circulation doesn't work unless
its done in very large chucks to major ISPs. If this isn't
the model followed, then we will see a lot more routes
for the equivalent number of new customers. People
complaining about the ability to carry both IPv6 and
IPv4 routing need to think carefully about how long
we'll actually last if the ISP's are injecting thousands
of unaggregatable routes from recovered address space
each day.
Been there, done that, got several t-shirts. Longer prefixes _will_
hit the routing system. ISPs will react by (re-)implementing prefix
length filters. Many people will whine.
Additionally, the run rate for IPv4 usage approximates
10 /8 equivalents per year and increasing. Even given
great legacy recovery, you've only gained a few more
years and then still have to face the problem.
This assumes consumption patterns remain the same which is, I
believe, naive. In a world where you have to pay non-trivial amounts
for address space utilization, people will only use the address space
they actually need and you'll see even more proliferation of NAT for
client-only services.
Rgds,
-drc